Personal blog - and temporary home page until new website is finished - of writer, editor and graphic artist Christopher Mills

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Sneak Peek: The New Femme Noir!

I'm pleased to announce that the Femme Noir team - Yours Truly, artist Joe Staton, inker Rick Burchett, and colorist Matt Webb - have begun production of a new Femme Noir
miniseries, "Cold, Dead Fingers." I can't say when it will be
finished, but I'm hopeful that it will be completed this year, and
probably see print in 2016. No publisher yet, but I have been having
some encouraging discussions.

To celebrate this new beginning, I
thought you folks might like to take a look at the first page of our
forthcoming supernatural crime saga. To make it more special, I'm going
to share with you the process that we employ in making our Femme Noir funnybooks.

I. It Begins With The Word:
In this case, I wrote a detailed plot, breaking down the storytelling
in some detail. No dialogue or captions as yet - I write those after I
have Joe's penciled pages in hand; as I am the letterer as well as
writer, I basically do both at the same time. Here's how the plot
described this first splash page:

PANEL 1. And
here we go…. We begin with a movie poster-styled splash page. In the
center of the image is a full-length shot of Le Femme, hat pulled down
low, guns in hands, trenchcoat whipping in the wind. Behind her is a
sketched in Port Nocturne skyline. On the left, there’s a huge,
spookily-lit “ghostly” head shot of our brutish killer – in this
iteration, he’s called “Crusher” Corrigan – and below him, a full-length
image of mad scientist Dr. Karl Boroff. On the right hand side of the
page, opposite Corrigan’s scary melon, is an equally spooky “ghost” head
of Madame Morella MaCabre. Below her, opposite of Boroff, is a
full-length figure of plainclothes dick Lt. Rod Riley, pistol drawn.

II. Joe's Deadly Pencil:
From this florid description, Joe draws the page in pencil, employing
his considerable talent and experience, working his magic:

Joe
then e-mails me a lo-res jpeg to review. Once I've looked it over, and
am sure that we're both happy with it, Joe then e-mails the page as a
hi-res image file to...

III. Putting The Noir In Femme Noir:
...inker Rick Burchett. Joe and Rick have worked together numerous
times before, perhaps most memorably on the 1980s incarnation of E-Man. In this case, Rick is applying his atmospheric blacks digitally, using his Cintique tablet.

Once
completed, Rick sends jpeg files to both Joe and I to see if we have
any notes. If everything's cool, as it is here, the image is then sent
on to our last teammate.

IV. Dangerous Hues: Colorist Matt Webb gets his hands on the page next, and with the original script for reference (and having colored several Femme Noir adventures before), Matt digitally - and dramatically - colors the page.

Nice,
huh? Once again, a lo-resolution copy of the colors is sent out for
approval of all and sundry. Then, it all comes back to me.

V. The Final Words:
With the finished page in my e-mail box, I take it into Photoshop and
fit it into the appropriate page template. Having scripted the dialogue -
or in this case, caption - when I got the pencils, I then do the
lettering in Illustrator. Finally, I drop the text in on the page back
in Photoshop... and voilà!

So that's how we do it. Repeat for pages 2, 3, 4 and so on... until the book is complete.

Welcome to Atomic Pulp

Christopher Mills is a professional writer of comic books and short fiction in a variety of genres, as well as a DVD reviewer for several pop culture websites. His taste in entertainment clearly peaked when he was about 15, which certainly explains his embarrassing obsession with James Bond, hardboiled crime fiction, comic books, paperback pulps, space opera, Universal/Hammer/Toho Monsters, sword & sorcery sagas, old genre TV shows and vintage B-movies.